drawing a body that remembers

Something clicked in me this weekend. A clarity I’ve circled for years without ever landing on it. It began with something simple: realising how little I’ve been moving. My body is stiff, almost resistant, as if movement itself were a threat. I’ve tried everything: Pilates, yoga, walking. Friends even bought me running shoes. Nothing stuck. I kept abandoning it all. I lost count of how much money I spent on apps and programs I never even opened.

Deep down, I always knew why.

Just like when I quit smoking over ten years ago, the problem wasn’t the behaviour. It was emotional. Something inner. A glitch below the surface that kept overriding every good intention.

Yesterday I watched a video of a man talking about “generational curses,” comparing his habits to eating to the patterns he inherited. Something hit me. I grabbed my journal and did the same “why” analysis I did all those years ago with cigarettes.

What I saw was stark.

There were no healthy models of movement around me growing up. Safety in my family meant staying still: sitting, drinking, smoking, numbing. Fixed bodies. Stationary presences. Sedentary. I was raised by people who anchored themselves to the sofa as if the world outside might swallow them whole. I absorbed that atmosphere like a climate. And I did something extraordinary with it, still: all my movement went inward. I became a person of vision, imagination, intellect, myth, analysis, and creativity. A woman who travels galaxies internally while the body stays still, perched on my sofa. It’s a brilliant adaptation. A kind of psychic athletics. But the body kept the original climate, the inherited stillness, the learned “don’t disturb the air.”

a thousand names - on Amazon

Yet I’m the woman who dreams of travelling, moving, adventure, horizon after horizon, and vision board after vision board. I am a hunter-gatherer brought up in a non-migratory family. I’m the one who imagines oceans, airports, forests, early morning light and even earlier flights. I read stories about travels, journeys, the faraway seas, and mysterious jungles. I can quote all those movies where the heroine is a writer who gets thrown into a forgotten land and makes it by herself. I avidly watch all available videos on adventures, and I have quite the collection of backpacks and bags... C'mon! The books I write are about women who evolve [internally] and move [physically]. And still, my own body doesn’t move. Not even as preparation for the life I claim to want.

That’s when I saw it clearly: I’m split.

Internally, I move. I evolve. I travel through ideas and images and landscapes. But physically, I’ve been frozen. A body caught in time and space while the inner world rushes forward. It doesn't help that my last solo hike in Scotland [tent and all] ended with me being rescued and rushed to AE, petrified of walking, to be honest.

So I asked myself a question that landed like a stone:

Am I scared of movement?

Because movement is initiation. Movement is presence. And presence means feeling. Sensation. Aliveness. For someone who spends so much time in imagination, intellect, mythic thinking, consciousness studies, and shamanic work, the body can feel like the one realm that isn’t as easily shaped or elevated. So staying still becomes a kind of truce. But underneath all that, there’s a quiet truth emerging: I am not avoiding exercise, I am not lazy: I am avoiding the vulnerability of fully inhabiting my body again. Because inhabiting it means admitting that I want it to be strong, mobile, flexible, attractive, capable of carrying me across the world. It means admitting desire, and desire always exposes a tender spot. My stillness isn’t inertia. It’s protection. The same old protection mechanism that once kept me safe enough to survive, now crystallised into physical immobility.

Hold on, I hear you saying: you just went to Oxford and gave a talk in front of people you didn't know! You are not a scared person! The fear I am sensing isn’t about Oxford or public speaking or external risk. Those things don’t scare me because they activate my gifts: my intellect, my presence, my voice, my mythic sense of self. That’s territory where I am sovereign. The fear is tied to embodied agency. Moving my body is a different register of selfhood: it breaks the family spell. It contradicts the ancestral tableau of static adults numbing themselves on a sofa. It makes me my own origin instead of an extension of that frozen scene. The fear is the fear of disloyalty to the atmosphere I was raised in. There’s also another layer: moving physically means admitting I am alive in a deeper way than they ever were. It means claiming vitality, strength, sexuality, attractiveness, readiness for partnership, and readiness for the world! That’s a kind of existential declaration. It’s not small. It touches shame, grief, inheritance, and longing. It touches everything they couldn’t claim for themselves. I am not afraid of movement itself. I am afraid of what it symbolises: leaving the psychic homeland that formed me. Leaving a safe spot on that sofa.

During the years of panic attacks, my body learned to fear sensation itself. Fear of feeling my own pulse. Fear of taking up space. Fear of the volume of my own existence. Better to stay still, quiet, invisible, shallow breadth and all; because invisibility cannot be expelled. If I didn’t move, no one would notice me and then ask me to leave. And in the stillness, I could disappear into my inner journeys untouched.

I also carried another entanglement: the belief that movement equals excess. My parents’ loudness when drunk, their extravagance, their chaos. I equated motion with instability. So I chose the opposite: stillness, silence, fixity. I mummified myself.

But the truth is simple: what kept my parents safe is not my safety. It never matched my nature. Internally, it never worked, and now it doesn’t even work externally. I do not want to live like a frozen specimen in my own life. I want to feel. To move. To risk. To be changed by the things I do.

And then another realisation: the same pattern shaped my relationship with money. Small movements. Tiny circles. Keeping things manageable so they wouldn’t become dangerous, overwhelming, loud. Even abundance became something to fear, something that could destabilise the fragile sense of safety I grew up with. Play small, woman. This is how we do it.

It’s this identity [the one built year after year in the name of “safety”] that has been shaping my reality. Safety meant smallness. Safety meant staying the same. Safety meant desire = danger. Wanting = unsafe. Change = annihilation.

My system has been loyal to safety, not to dreams.

But here’s the counterweight, the part that changed everything when I remembered it:

Since 1988, I have been expanding my world: gently, steadily, without even noticing the scale of it. From hiding in a single room after my brain shut down, to venturing out into the house, to walking outside, to sitting in a car with F. [1990], to trusting N. behind the wheel [1996], to getting my own driving licence [2004], to moving abroad [2008]; now to giving talks, to leading workshops...

I’ve already rewritten my body’s map of safety again and again.

I’ve already changed my identity through neuroplasticity.

Fear was always there, yes: but every time, I moved anyway. I widened my world anyway.

Those past memories, once rearranged, tell me now a different story. Not the story of a need to struggle to feel worthy, but the story of someone how slowly and consistently already changed. They stop being catastrophes survived, and become proof of my adaptability. Proof of change. Proof of movement.

Movement and hence change meant catastrophe to me, back then. It meant the possibility of death [literally], but now I can see that a bruised knee is just that: a bruised knee. No need to choose a coffin, Matilde.

Those past expansions now become predictions.

Predictions become expectations.

Expectations become new perceptions.

I have been changing all this time and never fully acknowledged it.

But why now? Why these realisations now? And then it dawned on me: because about a month ago I did something special, amazing, beautiful. I took a risk, but the attraction, sheer desire, craving and need for were far larger than any fear: I drew. I flew to Italy, stood up in front of people, and drew for three hours. I moved my body. I allowed sensations to appear, and because I was drawing, I accepted them as part of the process. I accepted my body, the pains, the sweat, the stiffness. I used up all the space, the whole large sheet of paper. I allowed my body to be, to take centre stage. I claimed that space. I moved air. I expanded and stretched. And as a dancer, I even showed up every day for a couple of weeks, with a strict regimen of training, before the night of the performance.

I moved my body. And this movement set in motion these reflections, bringing them into awareness.

... because everything starts and ends with the body...

Now the real task is simple: my body needs to catch up to the woman I’ve already become.

onwards + upwards

[literally],

mx